license, the bloodshed, the complete absence of all reference to the opinions of the substantial people of France, which characterized Lamartine's government in 1848, and the promptness, comparative bloodlessness, and deference to the wishes of France, which marked Louis Napoleon's virtual reconstruction of the Empire in 1851! The fate of a government inaugurated under such auspices was inevitable. Lamartine was at its head four months; and at the end of that time, he resigned it into the hands of a military dictator. The real man of the Revolution of 1848, however, was near at hand.

Charles Napoleon Louis Bonaparte had been elected a member of the first National Assembly by four of the departments of France at once, and stood again by right upon the soil whence he had twice been exiled. He was always popu lar with the people, and the Bonapartists, who had come to be the most numerous party in France, looked up to him as a leader. The cry of Vive l'Empereur would sometimes escape from a veteran of the Empire at sight of him; and it was a cry to which the populace were lenient. The impunity with which such expressions could be uttered was a token of danger to the "Provisional Government;" and Lamartine had him ostracized, to give quiet to the country which has since made him Prince-President and Emperor. With the same spirit which had dictated the abdication at Fontainebleau, he was deluded into a resignation. But, being elected a second time, and from five departments, he thought it his duty to accept the seat tendered him by his native city of Paris, and from that time his voice has controlled France. The government of Lamartine ignominiously fell; the frightful insurrection of June, 1848, demonstrated its unpopularity and its weakness. The members of the Assembly, in their private capacity, urged Lamartine and his colleagues to resign; they refused. But there was no alternative; and on the morning after the army had retrieved the disgrace of February, the Assembly conferred complete civil authority upon General Cavaignac, in addition to the supreme military authority with which they had invested him the evening before. The election of a President followed, and the Prince received six millions of votes, or four fifths of the

whole number; Cavaignac, on account of his immense popularity from his success in June, was second on the list. The Presidential career of Louis Napoleon was in all respects brilliant and useful. He has been blamed, however, for the expedition to Rome, and the restoration of the Pope. But from the point of view which nine tenths of European statesmen would take, that expedition can be successfully defended. It was simply a question between Austria and France; and the loss of a counteracting French influence in Italy would have been a loss to liberty. Even the Westminster Review says, "the expedition to Rome was well meant; limited in its first idea to the occupation of Civita, and only converted into an attack on Rome by the bad faith of Harcourt and the folly of Oudinot." Louis Napoleon sought to promote the cause of moderate liberty everywhere, without encouraging extreme parties in other countries. At home, however, he was opposed by a factious and turbulent minority, composed of Orleanists, Henri-quinquists, Republicans, and Anarchists, whose sole aim was to thwart him. The constitution itself was an absurd contrivance, invented to render the voice of the Assembly supreme over that of the President and the people. The latter part of the sittings of the Assembly was spent in attempting to get the control of an army which despised it, and to overawe a nation which hated, but feared it. It was quite evident that France was upon the eve of a crisis, and the public mind. reverted to the 18th of Brumaire.

Among the papers in the volume before us, is the pamphlet with the title of "The Revision of the Constitution," which was circulated about the time of the coup d'état and is generally attributed to the hand of Louis Napoleon. It is an able argument to show that parliamentary governments are too liable to abuses to exist in France, however well they may be adapted to England and the United States. Many of the views taken in this paper are identical with those presented in "L'Idée Napolienne," published some ten years before. The author has made a curious mistake in taking the theory of the British Constitution for its practice. He states that there is no fiction in the English government; that intrigues and parties are powerless; that there is no joining of hands

between the aristocracy and democracy to effect changes; that no third parties interfere; and that ministers are not occupied with trying all expedients to obtain a majority. The facts in the case would better have helped his argument; for, hardly a month later, Lord Palmerston lost his place in the cabinet for expressing his approbation of this very coup d'état, and avenged himself by successfully employing the machinery in question to overthrow Lord John Russell's ministry, all the factions, including the celebrated Irish Brigade, who voted in a body, joining with him on the unimportant question which he selected as a test.

The Imperial author, however, is more happy in his appreciation of the constitution of this country, which he considers a simple and wise arrangement, and to which he gives a decided preference, because the cabinet of the American President is selected by himself, to advise him during the whole four years of office, and does not depend upon the caprices or the intrigues of either house of Congress. To the objection which might be made to a centralization of power in the hands of the sovereign, that the ministers would be but clerks, he replies that Henry IV. and his successors, down to Napoleon himself, exercised a degree of power which would be repugnant to the feelings of the present day; but that their ministers, Sully, Richelieu, Colbert, Louvois, Choiseul, Turgot, Vergennes, and Talleyrand, were not mere clerks. The revi sion is urged, because the constitution was not adapted to the interests of France. Originating in the terror and uncertainty of a revolution, (the republic being proclaimed to prevent anarchy,) its authors had not kept their promise of consulting the people, who had never recognized it. Ephemeral and accidental as it was, it committed France to the interests of a socialism she had repudiated. More than two million petitioners, a large majority of the councils of the arrondissements, and eighty out of the eighty-four councils of the departments had already demanded the revision.

In the mean time, the condition of France had become alarming. The agents of the Bourbons, the Orleanists, and the Socialists hardly cared to conceal their plots, as they confided in the imbecility of the legislature and the theoretical

inactivity of the President. The government was powerless; all branches of industry, agriculture, and commerce stagnated; the laws were contemned; society seemed about to become once more a prey to convulsion and anarchy. Beyond the frontiers of France, but within the limits of that influence which a French revolution notoriously exercises, the elements of disorder were active. The assassins of Count Rossi at Rome, of Lamberg at Pesth, of the Princess Windischgratz at Prague, the English Chartists, the Irish Clubbists, and even the turbulent aliens residing in the United States, were all supposed to be ready for the demonstrations which were to take place upon the election of a French President in May, 1852, when Napoleonism could no longer exercise its powerful influence for peace and order. The clouds became

thicker and darker as the time approached.

Each of the factions in the Assembly now offered its services to the President, upon the condition of his acceptance of a ministry from its own ranks; but he had determined to rely entirely upon the people. Fully acquainted with every thread in the vast conspiracy, with an intimate knowledge even of the details of the various schemes for murder, pillage, and incendiarism, and of the men implicated in them, grasping completely a formidable plot to anticipate the May election and overturn, not the President, but the Presidency, and substitute the dictation of a new Assembly, Louis Napoleon saw that there was but one course for him to pursue, and that was, to depend upon the sagacity and patriotism of the six million of voters who had trusted in him, to institute a new order of things, and to defend it with the whole force of the military till the will of the people could be ascertained. St. Arnaud, Minister at War, De Maupas, Prefect of Police, and De Morny, a representative, were the three persons to whom he confided his plans, and with whom alone he consulted during the fortnight previous to the dénouement. We need not detail the complete success of the coup d'état. The principal measures were to arrest guilty and dangerous persons, to publish the official acts, to invest and occupy the palace of the Assembly, and to distribute the troops at such points as were judged necessary; and they were carried out according

to the original plan. The whole number to be arrested was but seventy-eight, eighteen of whom were representatives, and sixty heads of secret societies and captains of barricades. None of them had been lost sight of, and their plans were better known to the government than among themselves, for the fortnight previous. At noon, on the 2d of December, the Prince-President rode boldly through the streets of Paris, amid the acclamations of the populace, and reviewed his army, who were awaiting any insurrectionary movement. There was soon work to do: barricades were multiplying; the Socialist army of three thousand fighting men was distributed, and the troops had been fired upon. Citizens were warned to keep away from the barricades, and from the streets occupied by the military, and the fighting commenced. After two days of more or less skirmishing, the government was completely victorious, with a loss of only twenty-five killed, and one hundred and eighty-seven wounded. The insurgent loss was doubtless much greater, as no quarter was given to those found with arms behind the barricades. The satisfaction at the result was hardly greater at Paris than in the departments, where the conspirators had undertaken to anticipate the government by the circulation of false intelligence. Citizens met and exchanged congratulations. The nation passed absolution upon the act by the recorded votes of more than seven millions of freemen, notwithstanding the prodigious efforts of the partisans of the old dynasties, who foresaw, in the now probable and almost certain restoration of the Empire, the extinction of all their hopes. On the 1st of December, the French five per cents were at ninety francs; on the 10th, they were more than one hundred francs, an increase of over ten per cent. of the public and private wealth. All that remained of the long-vaunted mighty movement, which was to convulse Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, appeared in the feeble outbreak at Milan, a few months ago, where a few cowardly assassins were punished with confiscation or the gibbet.

The coup d'état of Louis Napoleon should have been a matter of congratulation to good citizens everywhere; and more especially did it benefit a country so devoted to loyalty